Magnus/Michael Gordon art show opens in Belize City

The show is called Detritus…which can be defined as rubbish, debris or silt. You might think naming an exhibition in such a manner would be an insult, but to artists Cornelius “Magnus” Harreil and Michael Gordon, that title is merely symbolic. News Five’s Karla Heusner reports.

Karla Heusner, Reporting
Cornelius Harreil, or Magnus as he prefers, holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art, but he has spent the last twenty-five years finding his art, or at least the materials to make it.

Karla Heusner
?The name of the show of course implies that is it sort of left over??

Magnus, Artist
?Like a junkshop. Like a trash heap that everything that would be required to produce this show came from the trash heap. Well, not exactly the trash heap, but it did come from objects found, gathered from every single point of the compass of this country.?

Magnus has a passion for transformation. He is particularly fond of using paint and glitter to jazz up bizarre objects like termite nests.

Magnus
?Most people are taking new things and turning them into antiques. And I am taking antique concepts and turning them into new concepts as well. So it?s a sort of…well, contradiction of terms at most, but yet it works. Because I would like to add a little sparkle and life to it, because it has been old, it has been discarded or presumed to be so. Perhaps because I am eighty-two these days and throw myself categorically into position. So by adding this bit of sparkle, I am talking about myself. Inwardly I may be doing just that; it might be a psychological trip I am on, I am not sure. But the idea is to create something beautiful. Whatever it?s made with, the object is to make it as beautiful as possible.?

Magnus is sharing the exhibition space at the Image Factory with Michael Gordon, who is clearly awed by the Magnus? pieces, despite his own previous international exhibitions. And as we discovered today, Gordon is as complex as his paintings and sculptures.

Michael Gordon, Artist
?This Magnus is a big guy. He?s quite international… So I have to watch the way how I have to present myself, because if I don?t put a shot to dig that blurs of channels in me as a companionship with, he can have a show with, I can?t be bigger. If I am being smaller, I can?t push him if I don?t have that power put into it. I feel like he is a guy who can accept a show.?

Karla Heusner
?You have a lot of portraits on the other wall. Tell us about those.?

Michael Gordon
?I have from Adolf Hitler, I have Bunny Wailer, I have Rita Marley, I have Bill Gladden, I have even my mother. I find it more or less something I could use to hold up a channel. Because these are people, if you can make them, you can have yourself, that you hold up a contendant, they ain?t no easy shake to shake it away, right??

Both Michael Gordon and Magnus have found satisfaction in working with young people and teaching them to use their own creativity to become self-sufficient.

Magnus
?The idea is that there is so much out there to live for. There is so much out here to do. As an artist, that is my job. This is not about money, what I do. If I can save one young child or a teenager or an adolescent from incarceration, I have done my job in spades. And that is what I am after.?

Michael Gordon
?I can look into a world and say I can move happy and have creation. And it can look into it that the happiness is privilege, a due.?

The show officially opens at the Image Factory tonight and will run for one month. We understand that proceeds from the sale of the pieces will benefit the Youth Hostel and inmates of the Hattieville Correctional Facility.